Genetic Ascension

Sylas walked forward, Runes dancing around him.

He could feel the Domain of Hell oppressing him, fighting against his swirling formation of dancing spacetime. This was the Domain of Earth, not of the Sea.

But Sylas had never been one to bend to the Will of another.

He fought back against the solid, oppressive wall with crashing waves of relentless Will. His Pride formed tides, his Infinite Will forming one Soul Construct of world-toppling tsunamis after another.

This wasn’t just a figure of speech. The reality played out in real time.

Spacetime was pulled into flowing currents and Runes spontaneously formed into their folds. The whims of the world were bent around Sylas as though he was twisting reality itself to his whims.

By comparison, Hell was solid and stoic. It wasn’t nearly as flexible, but what it did form didn’t break nearly as easily. However, this wasn’t all good, because it made it predictable, repeatable. Sylas knew exactly what he was going to face with every step, and by the time he made it 5% of the way up the mountain, he had already begun to use the repeatability of Hell’s Domain to his advantage.

A T. Rex swept toward Sylas. Using its head like a momentum-swinging whip, it rounded toward him in a wide arc until it could smash down its enormous head like a battering ram.

Sylas pressed out a palm. Before it could finish its rounding, the laws of acceleration twisted. Its angular momentum shifted and its carefully calculated arc toward Sylas was just off enough that its bite landed on an opposing dinosaur instead.

Blood spurted as it bit through a hard exterior shell sturdier than even a large tortoise’s.

Raising his palm upward, the force of the bite multiplied before the T. Rex could even pull back. Its teeth shattered, the ligaments of its jaw ripping to shreds as it bit the creature in half.

Two screams of pain echoed as one creature outright died, and then with another step forward, the T. Rex quickly followed.

Sylas’ palm landed on its body and it felt like something as heavy as a moon had crashed into it, ripping its leg to shreds as it was sent flying into the distance and right into the maw of a reptilian bird sweeping down from above.

Every calculation seemed to come with great ease to Sylas’ mind. He found counters to the Hell Domain’s counters, tweaking its laws as though they were his own.

With every dinosaur and beast he killed, his understanding of his own Fathomless Rune Creation increased.

The amount of Will it took lessened, the amount of calculation becoming more streamlined and clever.

He shouldn’t have been able to wield the laws in the Hell Domain at all, let alone use the truest form of Spark Mastery like this.

And yet that was exactly what he was doing.

More control, greater assertion of his Will. Every step forward weighed heavier, but he only responded in kind as though he wanted to pull everything into his current.

The more Sylas moved, the more he understood why it was he had gravitated toward Fathomless Rune Creation in the first place.

Hell was too rigid. It was arrogant in its stubbornness, but it didn’t effect change. It was patient and stoic, ignoring the ways of the world and only asserting things as they were, not as you wanted them to be.

Sylas didn’t have any experience with Heaven, but if the logic continued, it was likely very similar to Hell. It existed from above, looming over and overseeing. It probably had far more aspects of restraint than Hell did, keeping things beneath its dome of mastery and sitting upon its high perch.

Fathomless, however…

It was relentless. It crashed into things, eroding them away with either relentless power or relentless patience. It flowed and it ebbed, pushing forward and sliding back in a perfect balance and cadence of flexibility.

It could be just as self-assured as the others, but it imposed itself in ways the others didn’t.

Every path was just as arrogant as the other, believing themselves to be correct. It was why no one path was meant to be superior to the other.

However, it was because of that understanding that Sylas grasped why he was truly superior.

The flowing capabilities of Fathomless Rune Creation weren’t meant to be used with Spacetime like this. It was his combination of Rune Path and Fathomless Rune Creation that made him as broken as he was.

He still recalled Fanelei’s spirit telling him that Space and Time weren’t meant to be used in unison like this. It wasn’t supposed to be possible at all.

It had been so long since then that Sylas had almost neglected the fact that what he was doing shouldn’t be possible.

Normally, no matter how relentless the waves of Fathomless Rune Creation smashed into a Domain of Hell, the latter’s sturdiness would remain. At best, they would cancel each other out. Fathomless Rune Creation wouldn’t be able to significantly change Hell like this.

But for Sylas, it was different.

Because the very foundation of everything, regardless of Rune Path, was Spacetime.

Before Sylas, it didn’t matter what Rune Creation Path you had. Nor did it matter whether he learned the other Rune Creation Paths or not.

In fact, he had already innately learned which of the Rune Creation Paths was perfect for him.

There was no other that matched his abilities better, and ironically, no other that was more difficult to combine with his Rune Path.

If not for the difficulty of Sylas’ Rune Path, maybe he would have already grasped Rune Creation long ago.

But the results spoke for themselves.

He was truly Fathomless.

Deeper than Hell.

Taller than Heaven.

His sea could erode any Earth and drown any Sky.

There was nothing he couldn’t reap.

The mountains trembled as Sylas’ Sea of Spacetime crashed into it, seeping into its crevices until it began to erode at its very core.